2025/01/18 by Tyson Seburn · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Gender Studies in Language
paper · doi:10.1163/9789004721647_007
openalex publication_date 2025/01/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
An increasing focus on LGBTQ+ social inclusion is evident from the volume of popular media storylines with this primary character focus. On a parallel, but arguably slower trajectory, focus on LGBTQ+ identities has crept into English language teaching (ELT) contexts too, seen through an increasing number of LGBTQ-focused professional development sessions and bottom-up exposure to queer perspectives in classrooms. ELT broadly appears to recognise the value of queer representation to belonging in and thriving beyond our classroom spaces, and thus the need for this representation to impact the attitudes of non-queer learners through English instruction, too. Individually though, cogs in our professional wheel move at different paces, under different constraints, and to differing degrees of caution. Thus, it is important for teachers with immediate access to learners to be literate in critically examining materials “to recognise the extent to which heteronormativity and heteropatriarchy permeate even the smallest spaces and (inter)actions of everyday life” (Govender & Andrews, 2022, p. 86). Teachers ought to feel prepared to guide and make corrections for learners both inside and outside the queer community. In this chapter, I examine a typical coursebook through a taxonomy of heteronormativity (Moore, 2020) to demonstrate how (covertly) anti-queer published ELT materials can be, and then use a simple LGBTQ+ story to show a way in which we can employ complementary approaches to it for queer inclusion.